So, last week Microsoft has released the Windows 8 consumer preview. For me as a developer, that is great news and hopefully it will finally give Microsoft a place at the table in the tablet world. Now you can download the consumer preview and install it on a virtual machine, but as a developer I want to actually “experience” the OS on a tablet.

IE10 is a new browsing experience built in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style applications offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other Web standards. IE10 also includes a desktop experience for when you are using desktop tools and wish to continue using them in your existing workflows.

Let’s take a minute to walk without using Express Design to create a logo for your Windows Phone application. Expression Design is included in the Expression Suite – it is NOT included with the free version of Expression Blend (which is included in the Windows Phone SDK).

We're pleased to present the second Beta version of Expression Blend. Here are some of the changes since the Beta 1:

You can now instantiate resources from the Resources panel. For example, you can drag and drop a button style onto the artboard and create a button out of it instead of creating a button and applying it as a separate task.

You can see inner exceptions when an exception happens on the design surface, allowing you to see more details about the cause of an exception.

You now get font previews in the Text category of the Properties panel which makes it easier to choose your font. After adding an event handler, the XAML file is now automatically saved for you.

Configuring value editors has been improved. For example, you'll find editing BitmapEffects or adding items to an ItemsControl such as ContextMenu are now much easier to do.

It's a beautiful thing – the Windows Phone 8 Start screen is alive, personal, and it’s all about you, thanks to Live Tiles! The lock screen delivers delightful glance-and-go customization, with new ways to surface notifications and content in a way that connects with you.

But it doesn't get that way by magic and unicorn tears alone. It takes DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!

Wow - yesterday's MVVM in Windows 8 webinar, delivered by Gill Cleeren, was a real blast! We got so much positive feedback and requests for more detailed coverage of the topic - thanks everyone! We'll certainly discuss with Gill the option to unfold the topic into more in-deep webinars and will let you know. The recording of the webinar and demos will be published later today, meanwhile - find out who got the free ebooks in our webinar survey.

Our regular post-webinar survey asked you to leave feedback on what you liked or disliked in this webinar, and here's who grabs the free ebooks for constructive feedback left. The winners are:

A week ago we launched a private build by sending it only to the beta testers that were willing to take part in this early beta release. Now that we managed to further improve the control, we are launching this public beta featuring the following major functionalities:

Chris North has started a new project called flickrVIEWR. The main idea behind it is to make the sharing of photos in blogs easier by combining Silverlight and Flickr. Part 1 and Part 2 are already out.

My fiancée has this blog where she blogs about our new life in NZ. And
this is interesting to you because…? Well, it isn’t, but it is the
reason for this blog post as well as a few more coming soon. On her
blog, she posts pictures. These pictures are taken by her or me by a
camera with several megapixels. That makes them too big for her blog.
So she has to resize them before uploading them. This takes time and is
annoying. So I offered to solve it in a somewhat more modern way. By
using flickr. So she will upload her images to flickr and then use a
little Silverlight application to show them on her blog. So that’s
where this blog post is about…the flickrVIEWR…